What Is Local SEO?
This is a question that many businesses are asking right now. So what is local SEO and how can it benefit your business? Let’s start with why so many businesses are prioritising local SEO at the moment. On average there are over 5.6billion searches every day 46% of which want “local” results. This means there are 2.57billion local searches every day! A large number of businesses started to realise that this somewhat untapped area of marketing could easily become very fruitful.
Now knowing the statistics is great but it doesn’t answer our question, what is local SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This is term encompasses a huge amount of marketing tricks to get your website to the top of search results. Local SEO is just one section of the large overreaching arm that is SEO, despite this local SEO can prove to be one of the most tangible marketing methods out there.
How Does It Work?
Typically local SEO works to get your website and physical store suggested to people searching for stores in your area. “Near me” and “close by” searches increased by over 900% in the past 2 years. Most google searches come with two types of results now: 1 a local pack with a map of the searched for area and a list of businesses within the area, 2 the organic search results which are seen on every google search. Local SEO will often entail effectively editing the businesses Google My Business (GMB) page and the businesses website to elevate the website and business to higher places on the search results.
What Are The Benefits?
Being one of the first results on a google search is imperative for businesses. This is not just for the exposure but also the reputation they gain from being able to show that they can compete with global powerhouses. For instance if you were to search for ‘Cafes York’ you will see the top 3 results are all independent shops. This proves that with the correct marketing small businesses can gain the edge over large dominant businesses.
In 2015 Moz (a SEO tool creation company) conducted research on Googles 3-pack system. In their report it was revealed that 44% of people who attempted a Google search would click on the local pack to see local stores near them, another 8% chose to see more local results. Only 19% of the total people clicked on any of the paid results. This shows that local SEO can prove to be much cheaper and much more viable than other SEO tactics.
If you would like to find out more about SEO and how it can benefit your business I suggest looking at one of our other posts: How to promote your business – using Google. Or you can visit our website at https://mwdigitalyorkshire.co.uk/ . But if you think you’re ready to get stuck in contact us to find out how we can help.
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